Love's Labour's Lost

Past scholars have often decried Love's Labour's Lost as wholly insignificant, a self-indulgent piece by William Shakespeare before he moved on to more serious work. More recently, Cambridge University's Anne Barton described the play as "relentlessly Elizabethan," with dialogue that is mostly inaccessible to modern audiences because it's filled with in-jokes and references that are specific to the 1590s. But Jennifer Uphoff Gray hopes to prove that the comedy can appeal to today's theatergoers when Milwaukee Shakespeare opens its production in the Studio Theatre of the Broadway Theatre Center tonight with a 7:30 p.m. performance. To give the play a modern take, Milwaukee Shakespeare has placed the production in contemporary society.